Multidevice profiles

Persoo is designed to track real people, not just browsers. Today, people use multiple devices – visiting your site on desktop, reading emails and notifications on mobile or tablet. To have complete image of customer behaviour, you must track the customer on all the devices.

Persoo uses 2 identification types to identify the visitor:

• browserID – basically, it is a random but unique cookie (or device id) stored in a browser according to a privacy policy setting for each visitor (expiration varies on the settings). One Visitor can have multiple devices, therefore multiple BrowserIDs. Is created and assigned in the first moment of accessing the page.
• custom identification – for example e-mail, userID, phone, FBid etc. One Visitor can have only one ID of each. On the other hand you can identify him once by userID, next time by phone. But these aliases must be verified and imported to Persoo from your CRM.

At the begining of each visit, browserID is read from the cookie or new browserID is created. This browserID is used to report events for the browser to Persoo profile. Visitor has anonymous profile.

When visitor identifies himself by login or by comming from verified email, identification event is reported to a Persoo profile related to this identification (i.e. visitor profile for given userID/email). Following events made by this visitor may be routed to the identified profile too, or switched back  anonymous profile. It depends on your setting, how much each identification event identifies (there is default settings, but can be override for each visitor individually).

Modes of Identification Request Life Span

Identification event identifies

• current page only – current anonymous browserID is saved in the browser, new browserID is created for reporting events to identified profile with given custom identification (email, userID,…). First pageview without identification will switch the browser to original “anonymous” visitor profile with saved browserID.Example: you trust only to the behaviour made by logged in users. Each pageview must contain identification, because unidentified pageview would mean logout.
  You do not want to show your visitors their browsing history made after logout on other synchronised devices where they log in.
• whole session – like the above, but the identification event will identify all events from the same browser session. Browser is switched to original “anonymous” visitor profile at the beginning of a new session.Example: landing from a newsletter email will reliably track visitor behaviour from this session, but not more.
• whole browser (the default) – there is only 1 browserID for the browser. Anonymouse profile before the identification event is merged to identified profile. All events happening in the future in the same browser will be routed to the identified profile.Example: visitor clicked remember me, because he is the only user of his laptop.

Let as look how identification works more in detail.

Collisions in custom identifications in the same browser

Let us assume, that visitor is already identified in the browser by email (or other Custom ID).

If there is a new e-mail identification detected in a browser, that belonged to other e-mail, Persoo will create a new session starting at the time of new identification and considers this person as a new visitor. The previous browsing history was recorded to the previous e-mail, and is separate from the new one.

If there are multiple Custom ID identifications detected (e.g. visitor is identified by e-mail and then identifies by Facebook ID), they are also considered as a conflict, and split into two visitors. This happens unless Persoo gets a specific information, that these two IDs are aliases belonging to one Visitor Profile (alias must be verified information from your CRM)

… when identification identifies only current page

Goal: Very strict privacy. When user is logged in, we synchronize all data from all his browsers, where he is logged in, in real time. I.e. the product view history will contain all products from all the browsers, where the visitor was logged in. But immediatelly after logout, the website cannot show user’s history from all his browsers. At maximum it may show only the browsing history made in anonymous mode in this only browser.

How it technically works: Each browser is related to 1 – 2 visitor profiles at the same time. The anonymous profile for this browser and the identified profile related to logged user.

… when identification identifies whole session

Goal: Quite strict privacy. Similar to the case above, but all events made in the current session in the browser are attributed to the last logged user in this session. This case solves the problem with identifications made by the click through a verified email. When vistor receives your email and opens the email i.e. on mobile, where he is not logged in. The current session (what the user did immediatelly) after opening the email will be saved to the identified profile.

How it technically works: Each browser is again related to 1 – 2 visitor profiles, but the identification is stored in session cookie.

… when identification identifies whole browser

Goal: When you believe, that today there are personal devices and noone shares his smartphone with other people, you will get this model, where all previous and future browsing history will be merged into an identified visitor profile.

How it technically works: Every browser is related to exaclty 1 visitor profile at a time. Only conflict in two different logins will replace the browserID.

How to settup correct identification model for my site?

You can set up defaults in Persoo Administration in Settings – Identfifications.

Other option is to override default setting in each browser by assigning correct value to

Let us know if you need help with individual settings.